Dr. Angela Duckworth

We cycled her through ballet, through pottery.

She did track one year.

She played the viola.

I mean, one thing after the other.

We had in our family the hard thing rule.

families have their rules.

We in the Duckworth family raised our kids by the hard thing rule.

It had three parts and it was all really about the philosophy of interest and sampling.

So the first part was, well, it has to be something that requires your hard thing because everyone has to do the hard thing, right?

So you can choose a hard thing, but the hard thing has to have an element of deliberate practice.

So it has to have goals and effort and feedback.

Okay.

So viola counted.

Right.

But like that little studio down the street where you basically just ate goldfish crackers and like hung out like that, that doesn't count because there are no goals, no effort.

There's no feedback.

Okay.

That was rule part one.

The second part was you were not allowed to quit in the middle.

So when Lucy came home from her very first track meet, she actually came up to the bleachers and she was like, mom, I don't want to run track anymore.